No description available.

The purpose of this autoethnographic narrative inquiry was for the researcher to describe and explain how he discovered, constructed, and refined his sense of moral purpose as a principal during his seven-year tenure at Orange Pines Middle School. He inductively analyzed and reflected primarily on self-authored texts tied to critical professional ethical dilemmas so as to discover emergent themes, patterns, insights, and epiphanies in the development of his persona as a morally directed school leader. He then analyzed and reflected on how he applied those defined values in interactions with groups of teachers to design and implement elements of school reform. He re-created these critical events through descriptive vignettes in which he captured personal and social implications of the experiences using Clandinin and Connelly's model of three-dimensional narrative space. In this study the researcher probed especially problematic ethical dilemmas he experienced while working as principal. He viewed the events through the multidimensional ethical frameworks of care, critique and justice of Starratt; the ethic of community described by Furman; and the ethic of the profession, posited by Shapiro and Stefkovich. Included is a discussion of moral purpose by Fullan and Sergiovanni, ethics by Begley, Senge, and others, leadership theories, and perspectives regarding interpersonal conflicts between principals and their staff. The researcher found the ethics of care, justice, critique, community, and the profession provided a useful framework for his professional reflections. He was able to describe and capture the tensions within the dilemmas through the specific language utilized by Starratt, Furman, and Shapiro and Stefkovich to analyze and understand the issues packed within each dilemma. Through the application of these frameworks he determined that his moral purpose has been to approach the position of school leadership with a combination of compassion and justice, in order to establish a collaborative and synergistic school community that works for the greater good of students. The study calls for more autoethnographic research into the dilemmas administrators teachers face in their daily practice, arguing that the best way to improve public education in this era of intense scrutiny and accountability is through the qualitative analysis of individual cases. The author places his particular constructivist approach to autoethnographic narrative inquiry within the broader philosophical background of qualitative research. This study contributes to the literature by showing focused insights into how representative ethical conflicts and dilemmas school leaders face during their daily practice can shape and guide their moral pursuit of effective school reform. It also shows ways that theoretical knowledge can inform professional practice.

Despite predictions of Internet shopping reaching 6.9 trillion dollars by the end of 2004, research is now suggesting many online consumers are still very reluctant to complete the online shopping process. A number of authors have attributed consumers' reluctance to purchase online to apparent barriers, however, such barriers have not been fully examined within a theoretical context. While most studies of consumers' decision to shop on the Internet have focussed on key shopping determinants, this thesis builds a conceptual model grounded in consumer behaviour theory. In particular, this thesis explores the application of the perceived risk theoretical framework, specifically looking at one dimension of perceived risk theory - performance risk and the influence it has on the phenomenon of Internet Abandoned Cart Syndrome (ACS). To explore this phenomenon, a number of extrinsic cues are identified as playing a major role in the performance evaluation process of online purchases. The combination of these elements enabled the researcher to develop a conceptual model from which a series of propositions were drawn. To acquire pertinent data and investigate each proposition, this study used a combination of indirect and direct techniques, namely projective techniques in the form of a third-person vignette, a structured tick-box questionnaire and finally semi-structured interviews. The results suggest that collectively the extrinsic cues of brand, reputation, design and price have an overall impact on the performance evaluation process just prior to an online purchase. Varying these cues either positively or negatively had a strong impact on performance evaluation. The conclusion of this study suggests consumers are often unable to measure the full extent of risk-taking directly. In the majority of cases, consumers are guided by numerous factors, some intrinsic, others extrinsic. E-tailers with an established reputation, a well designed web site with known brands and a balanced pricing strategy reduce the perceived performance risks associated with purchasing online, thus reducing the occurrence of ACS.

Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Technology: Design in the Faculty of Informatics and Design at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2012 / The aim of the research is to explore design education and designing as social practice; working with and for others to inform a more sustainable and meaningful future. Ways in which the lived experience of participants in the discipline of design, in the culturally diverse university and community contexts can be harnessed for social benefit, are interrogated. Themes are explored around the value of different world views and forms of knowing in design education to inform design research, in order to extend the knowledge paradigm to include lived experience not only as site of knowledge formation, but also of wisdom acquisition. The thesis presents an amalgamation of professional practice, creative practice and narrative set in qualitative research methods appropriate to the designer and artist who desire to work with lived experience in the academic context. Lived experience informs all we do and each educational event and encounter ought to be appraised and responded to in a contextually sensitive way. An important aspect flowing from this amalgamation is the recognition and analysis of the coexisting relationships of the roles inhering in the educator and the student. In order to immerse oneself in research and teaching, all aspects of the process have to be lived and filtered through the senses. This implies resisting abstractions by grounding research, teaching, design and making in the experience of the moment. The original contribution of this research then, is the synthesis of design, art and narrative writing that accompanied in a parallel line, the academic writing process to culminate in this design folio — a testament to grounding the research project in practice. Pedagogical approaches and lived experience embodied as recontextualised expressions in design teaching, supervision and creative practice, are presented in the folio. The boundaries of qualitative methods were tested with narrative and life writing, autoethnography, poetry, studio observations, extensive journalling, drawing, photography and printmaking processes. The results showed that a phenomenology of the senses in creative work, and locating the designer in her or his biography, is where original and imaginative design resides. Social and cultural aspects are some of the foundation stones of design education and ought to be informants of the creative process until the finish. Furthermore, authentic openness is required in supervision and teaching to facilitate deep listening, interpretation, intuition and “in-seeing” in educational encounters. Finally, being an active creative practitioner in design teaching is as important if not more important than content knowledge in that discipline, since the active practitioner “becomes” the Other through the collective dimension of design work.

The aim of this thesis was to ascertain the self-assessment of university students with various specializations, in their knowledge of information and communication technology (ICT). The theoretical part concerns with self-assessment as concept and methods pertaining to its verification. It also contains a detailed description of the anchoring vignettes method with its application in specific areas. Also discussed is the Overclaiming Technique. An evaluation has been conducted in the empirical part, which elaborates on self-assessment of ICT terms of various groups of students. Anchoring vignettes method is used in order to amend said self-assessment. Aforementioned part of the thesis also contains the use of overclaiming technique in practise, which is demonstrated on a specifically devised questionnaire. In this questionnaire, the students were asked to evaluate their level of understanding both existing and non-existing terms from the ICT area. The results have shown that there are significant differences between the questioned groups of students. The numbers indicate that students of ICT have a greater tendency to exaggerate the level of their knowledge in the area of information and communication technologies. Much more so than students who specialize in different subject.

The thesis focuses on quasi-experimental research design using descriptions of hypothetical situations (vignettes) with varying dimensions and their levels. The thesis is divided into three parts. First one is devoted to the presentation of the FSA. Second (methodologic) part describes the circumstances of the research conducted within the thesis. It is focused on comparison of FSA and traditional polling method, represented by itemized battery. Topic, through which the comparison is made, is crime, respectively punitiveness. The research also focuses on the comparison of classical and projective methods of questioning. The questionnaire survey method CAWI used split- ballot experiment - a sample of 505 respondents was divided into two parts. One half was interviewed with the vignette and subsequent itemized battery focused on mitigating / aggravating circumstances in the ordinary form (first person) of polling, the second part received a projective form (third person) of the questionnaire. The conclusions of the research are focused both on identifying the mitigating and aggravating circumstances using different methods of inquiry and their comparison, and on a combination of FSA and itemized battery in analysis and detection of inconsistent (and potentially socially desirable) topics. From the...

No description available.

No description available.

Self-reported health depends on the internal frame of reference and on response styles. One way of studying this dependency is using anchoring vignettes. Response shift effects are assumed to induce a negative correlation between self-reported health and the health assessments attributed to the vignettes. Method: A representative sample of the German adult population (N = 2,409) was selected. Participants were asked to rate their health state and the health states of two rather complex vignettes representing patients with several health complaints on a 0-100 scale. Results: The mean score of self-assessed health was M = 76.20 (SD = 20.6). There was a very small positive correlation between the assessment of the vignettes and the self-assessed health state (r = .12). After controlling for a proxy of objective health, measured in terms of chronic conditions, the relationship remained slightly positive. Chronic conditions were only marginally associated with the assessments of the vignettes (0 conditions: M = 44.8; ≥ 2 conditions: M = 42.2). Conclusions: The lack of the postulated association between self-reported health and vignettes’ ratings means that we cannot derive tools to correct the subjective ratings for differential use of frames of reference.

This study looks at the application of the anchoring vignettes method in evaluating university students' level of English language. The theoretical part of the study describes the possibilities of language level measurement, Common European Framework of Reference for Languages and outlines the anchoring vignette method. Works of other authors using this method in different fields (including pedagogy) are also mentioned. One chapter is dedicated to self- assessment and its synonyms - how they are used in practice and research. The practical part presents the results of the author's original survey. Questionnaires were administered on pedagogical and business students in the comparison of self-assessment and objective knowledge survey. This work has illustrated the diversity of usage of the self-assessment scales, undervaluation of the students and the difference between the self-evaluation before and after the correction by the anchoring vignettes. In addition, the findings of this study show that the order of the self-assessment scale and the anchoring vignettes in the questionnaire matters and that placing the vignettes after the self-assessment is preferable.